Two physicians offer commentaries on the best course of action for a part-time janitor with no health insurance to receive the proper standard of care for his chronic recurrent prostatitis.
Joseph Turow, PhD, Robert Gellman, JD, and Judith Turow, MD
Health marketers use a number of means to collect information about consumers, which when combined with health record information, could constitute a violation of patient privacy.
Physicians have a responsibility to balance patient confidentiality and full disclosure to the family of adolescent patients with eating disorders in order to provide optimal treatment.
Research in the PED and PICU is essential to medical understanding of the efficacy of emergency interventions. Researchers must minimize the additional stress that consent and participation in research entail for pediatric patients and their families.
Research is often conducted without the knowledge or consent of those whose tissues are banked and poses possible harms to social groups if information about a few members is unscientifically applied to all.
Aside from its use to rule out potential physical causes of a patient’s condition, for example a brain tumor, neuroimaging is not used in the process of psychiatric diagnosis.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.